IN GREEN ALASKA 



on the prairies from New England, New York, or 

 Pennsylvania must have suffered. Their hearts did 

 not take root here. They did not build them- 

 selves homes, they built themselves shelters. Their 

 descendants are trying here and there to build 

 homes, trying by tree planting and other devices 

 to give an air of seclusion and domesticity to their 

 dwellings. But the problem is a hard one. Nature 

 here seems to covet the utmost pubUcity. The farm- 

 ers must build lower and more rambling houses, 

 cultivate more grassy lanes, plant longer avenues of 

 trees, and not let the disheveled straw-stacks dom- 

 inate the scene. As children we loved to sit on the 

 laps of our fathers and mothers, and as children of 

 a larger and older growth we love the lap of mother 

 earth, some secluded nook, some cosy corner, where 

 we can nestle and feel the sheltering arm of the near 

 hoi'izon about us. 



After one reaches the more arid regions beyond 

 the Rockies, what pitiful farm homes he sees here 

 and there, — a low one-room building made of 

 hewn logs, the joints plastered with mud, a flat 

 mud roof, a forlorn-looking woman with children 

 about her standing in the doorway, a rude canopy 

 of brush or cornstalks upheld by poles for shed and 

 outbuildings ; not a tree, not a shrub near ; a few 

 acres of green irrigated land not far off, but the hills 

 and mountains around bare, brown, and forbid- 

 ding. We saw hundreds of such homes in Utah, 

 3 



